Linux Mint, a Linux distribution whose purpose is to produce a
modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both
powerful and easy to use, has released an edition based on Debian.
This new Linux Mint distribution will track Debian testing, as
a more reliable upstream base. Linux Mint appears
to be a popular Linux distribution ranking highly at DistroWatch.com as
well as other non-scientific measures. Certainly they received a large
number of comments to their blog post
regarding their new
distribution. Anecdotal evidence seems to point to this Debian-based
edition as a popular move.

The addition of Linux Mint to the Debian derivatives family is a
welcome one, and should the Linux Mint developers wish to be in
contact with Debian it has been suggested that they will be warmly welcomed
at the Debian
Derivatives Front Desk.

Andreas Tille began a short
discussion regarding bugs which are not
grave software bugs per se, but could cause grave harm to life or
property under certain conditions. As an example, the bug in question
involved improper data handling that could lead to a medical patient
being prescribed medicine which could lead to a possibly fatal
reaction. Responses from developers indicated that despite such bugs
not being explicitly mentioned in the bug guidelines, they should
already fall under release-critical severity and thus should have
freeze exceptions and possible Debian Security Advisories if needed.
The fix for the bug in question was approved for testing within the
day.

Jonathan Nadeau published the first issue of the This week in
Debian podcast! The podcast is available in Ogg Vorbis format as
well as MP3.
In this issue he interviewed Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli about
Debian influence in the Linux universe and its link with upstream and
derivative developers.
Stefano also spoke about the Debian Project and its organisation,
and more specifically the Debian Project Leader tasks.

Congratulations, Jonathan, and thanks for your work! We are looking forward to
hearing new issues of your podcast!

Alexander Wirt announced that the backports for Debian Etch have
finally been removed from the servers. Over the lifetime of etch-backports
there accumulated a total of 508 different backports, resulting in more than
2250 binary packages for all Debian architectures offered to users.
Altogether the available backports and their source occupied 13Gb of
disk space on the mirrors. The backports team would like to thank every
contributor and mirror administrator for their work and their help which
made this possible.

Gerfried Fuchs noticed that
recently the number of release-critical bugs in the stable release Debian
5.0 Lenny has dropped below the 900 mark, and thanks all who helped
keeping that number down. It should be noted that the high number of
open release-critical bugs for the stable release contains a fair amount
of false positives (e.g. serious fails to build from source bugs
with newer compiler versions that aren't shipped in the stable release).
Previously Gerfried blogged about usage of
the Bug Tracking System.
If you would like to join the efforts of keeping the bug tracking system
clean, please read this post and contact Gerfried should any questions
arise.

After hearing some myths about how Ruby is packaged in Debian, Lucas
Nussbaum wrote about some of the
Ruby myths in his blog. It ranges from general version culture and API
stability, over the necessity of package splits, performance issues and
porting issues up to communication with the upstream developers and
motivation issues. He also noted that due to these problems it's
difficult to find new people to join the Ruby packaging teams, and that
they are quite understaffed.

In coordination with Debian's Account Managers, Debian Project Leader
Stefano Zacchiroli proposed a general resolution to welcome non-packaging
contributors as full project members. While the Debian Account Managers
already are empowered to do so, and while it is already possible to become
an official Debian Developer without doing packaging work, this procedure
has rarely been used. So Stefano wants to make a clear sign from the entire
project that Debian does welcome and honour non-packaging contributions.
This goal has already been achieved partly, as Stefano's proposal got a lot
of support in quite a short time-frame. However, the naming of
non-packaging contributors as well as possible upload rights are under
discussion.

Raphaël Hertzog wondered
whether the Debian project shouldn't have an official page on
some non-free web service. Stefano Zacchiroli disagreed
on the grounds that it would not be possible to use a proprietary service without
endorsing it.

Christian Perrier addressed his thanks
to the release team and encouraged every developer, whether their
package is unblocked or not, to send private thank you
messages to any Release Team member for their amazing work.

Miriam Ruiz is grateful towards the release team who agreed to unblock Gnash 0.8.8 in Debian
Squeeze, which is by far a better option than the buggy 0.8.7.
Among the improvements in the version that will be shipped in the next Debian stable
release, lots of online video will now be working, it can switch at runtime
between the Cairo, OpenGL, and AGG renderers, and it can use hardware acceleration.

Luca Falavigna thanked everyone (especially Moritz Muehlenhoff) taking the trouble
to file removal bugs on the ftp.debian.org pseudo-package, in order to clean
up unused and buggy packages from the archive in order to prepare the
upcoming Debian Squeeze release.

A new
version of klibc has been released. This newer klibc release fixes
ipconfig, which is responsible for netbooting, a method that is quite often
found in larger cluster environments or bigger Debian deployments. ipconfig
saw several fixes in order to procure more reliable netboot.

1 applicant has been
accepted
as a Debian Developer and
1 person started
to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian
Project News. Please welcome
Luke Faraone and Andreas Beckmann
into our project!

According to the unofficial
release-critical bug counter, the upcoming release,
Debian 6.0 Squeeze, is currently affected by
317 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved
or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about
126 release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the
release to happen.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about
security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please
subscribe to the security mailing
list for announcements.

Currently
492 packages are orphaned and
129 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the
recentreports
to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete
list of packages
which need your help.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers
to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the
contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail
at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.